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Amazon Strategy

How to Choose an Amazon Agency If You’re Doing $1M–$10M Per Year

If your brand is doing between one and ten million dollars a year on Amazon, you’re in what I’d call the stuck-in-the-middle stage. You’ve grown past the point where a freelancer or a cheap, set-it-and-forget-it PPC service cuts it. But you’re probably not ready — or not willing — to staff a full in-house Amazon team or pay the fees that enterprise-level agencies charge.

What you actually need is an agency that treats your Amazon account like the business it is. Not a task manager. Not a report polisher. A profit operator — someone who understands your margins, your data, your rankings, your competitors, and connects all of it to help you grow.

That urgency is only growing. Amazon reported $17.2 billion in advertising services revenue in Q1 2026 alone — up 24% year over year. More brands are spending, CPCs are getting more competitive, and the window for running Amazon ads without a real strategy is mostly closed. Getting this hire right matters more now than it did two years ago.

The real question when evaluating any agency isn’t “which one is cheapest?” It’s: does this agency know how to scale an Amazon account profitably, or are they just selling PPC management?

The $1M–$10M Problem No One Talks About

At this stage, you’re likely the founder or ecommerce manager still involved in the day-to-day. You’re watching the reports, tracking the numbers, and something feels off. PPC feels messy. You’re retroactively fixing problems as they come up instead of seeing opportunities and going after them.

That’s exactly what the wrong agency will keep you doing. They’ll manage the account on a task-by-task basis — adjusting bids here, adding negatives there — and send you a clean-looking report each month. Meanwhile, your sales are flat, your organic rank is drifting, and your profits aren’t improving.

At this revenue level, you don’t need a vendor. You need a partner — someone who understands the full picture: ads, listings, rankings, inventory, margins, competitor pricing, review velocity, and how all of it connects.

The Mistake That Costs Brands the Most

The most expensive mistake I see brands in this range make is comparing agencies on price or contract terms, as if they’re all offering the same thing. They’re not.

The cheaper agency is almost never the better deal. The real risk isn’t your agency fee — it’s what a bad agency costs you in missed opportunities and poor strategic decisions. An agency that saves you $2,000 a month but spends an extra $20,000 in inefficient ad spend, or pauses campaigns that were building your organic rank just to make ACoS look clean on a report — that’s not savings. That’s a setback that takes months to undo.

I’ve seen it happen: an agency “optimizing” an account by lowering bids, pausing keywords, and tightening negatives — all the moves that make a client report look clean — while completely ignoring what those decisions were doing to the brand’s long-term organic rank. A good agency sometimes accepts a higher ACoS on a specific keyword because they know you need to hold that ranking for the business to compound. A task executor doesn’t think that way.

What Good Amazon Management Actually Looks Like

Here’s a real example. We worked with a brand starting from zero and helped them grow to over $1 million in sales in sixteen months — launching more than fourteen products, with two reaching the number-one spot in their niche.

That didn’t happen by running PPC. It happened by treating the account like a full business: building listings with proper keyword research and Helium 10 structure, using PPC strategically to build rank at the right moments, monitoring organic performance and inventory together, and making every ad decision in the context of the bigger picture.

That’s the standard you should hold any agency to. Not “can you lower my ACoS?” but “can you grow this account profitably over the next twelve months?”

How to Evaluate an Amazon Agency: A 5-Step Framework

Before you talk to a single agency, get clear on what you actually need. “Better PPC” is not specific enough. Know the real problem you’re trying to solve — high ACoS, stalled organic rank, poor conversion on new listings, scaling an existing winner. If you’re not sure, start with a full account audit before you hire anyone. SellTru offers full Amazon account audits that map exactly where your account stands and where the real opportunities are.

Once you know what you need, here’s how to evaluate agencies:

1. Ask about their campaign structure. A strong agency can describe their exact approach — how they organize campaigns, separate auto from manual, and isolate proven converters. If they can’t explain it simply, they haven’t thought it through.
2. Ask what data drives their decisions. Search Term Reports, Business Reports, organic rank trackers, competitor pricing — all of it should factor in. Surface-level agencies live only in Campaign Manager. Business-minded agencies live in the full data.
3. Ask about your margin structure. An agency that doesn’t know your margins cannot set a rational ACoS target. If they’re not asking about margins and inventory in the first conversation, move on.
4. Ask how they handle organic rank. Ad decisions and organic rank are inseparable at this stage. An agency that treats them as unrelated problems doesn’t understand the Amazon flywheel.
5. See if they ask good questions. This is the simplest filter. If an agency leads the first call with a pitch instead of questions about your business, they’ll manage your account the same way. If they don’t ask good questions, they won’t make good decisions.

Red Flags to Watch For

Beyond the framework above, these are the signals that should make you walk away immediately:

• Percentage of ad spend pricing. Stay far away from this model. An agency charging 10–15% of your ad spend has one financial incentive: increase your spend. That’s directly opposed to your profitability.
• Guaranteed ACoS targets before they know your margins. A promised “25% ACoS” from an agency that hasn’t seen your P&L is not a strategy — it’s a sales pitch. Amazon itself is explicit on this: there is no definitive “good ACoS” because it depends on your margins, category, company size, and campaign goals. Amazon ties break-even ACoS directly to profit margin — which is exactly how a serious agency should think about it. Any agency that leads with a universal target either doesn’t understand that, or is telling you what you want to hear.
• Vague answers about campaign structure. “We run Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands” is not an answer. Press for specifics on how they build and separate campaigns.
• No questions about inventory or your product roadmap. Ad strategy without inventory awareness leads to stockouts in the middle of campaigns. It’s one of the most common and costly avoidable mistakes.

What You Should Expect to Pay

For genuine full account management at the $1M–$10M level — covering ads, listings, strategy, and reporting — expect to pay between $3,000 and $10,000 per month. That range reflects real work: not just running campaigns, but actively managing the account as a business.

At this stage, the agency fee is not your biggest financial risk. The bigger risk is paying a cheaper agency that doesn’t understand the business and costs you far more in wasted spend, missed ranking opportunities, and months of cleanup. Think of it like hiring a CFO: the question isn’t just what they charge, it’s what happens to the business with and without them.

One important note on pricing models: avoid any agency charging a percentage of ad spend. Their incentive is to increase your budget, not your profit. A flat monthly retainer aligns your goals with theirs. For a full breakdown of agency pricing tiers and what you should expect at each level, see our guide on how much Amazon PPC management actually costs.

What Most Agencies Get Wrong at This Stage

Most agencies treat accounts at this level as a collection of tasks rather than a business. They focus on surface-level PPC moves — adjusting bids, updating negatives, changing match types — and optimize for what the client wants to see in a report, not what actually moves the business forward.

A good agency thinks like a business owner. They understand your margins, protect your organic rank, flag inventory risks before they become stockouts, and connect every ad decision to the long-term health of the account. That’s not a higher level of service — it’s the minimum standard for a brand at your stage.

Is Your Current Setup Actually Working?

Before hiring anyone, take a hard look at where you are today. Ask yourself honestly: does someone actively manage this account who understands the full business — ads, listings, rankings, inventory, margins, and profit together?

If the honest answer is no, it’s time to reevaluate. At the $1M–$10M stage, you can’t afford to have someone retroactively fixing things as they break. That approach compounds over time — you lose rank, lose efficiency, and lose ground to competitors who are moving with intention.

If you want a second set of eyes, SellTru can review your account and show you exactly what’s working, what’s being missed, and where the real growth opportunities are.

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The right agency for a brand at your stage isn’t the cheapest one, or the one with the best sales call. It’s the one that thinks like a business owner — asking hard questions, managing the full picture, and making decisions based on what’s best for your long-term growth. That’s what this stage of the business demands, and it’s what separates the agencies worth hiring from the ones that will cost you more than they save.

Also worth reading: if you’re still deciding between managing Amazon in-house or outsourcing it entirely, our breakdown of Amazon agency vs. in-house management covers exactly what that decision looks like at different revenue stages. And before any agency call, our list of 15 questions to ask an Amazon marketing agency will make sure you’re getting the real answers you need.

Have more questions about hiring and evaluating Amazon agencies? See our full FAQ →